Customers are more tech-savvy than ever before, and marketers have a huge arsenal of tools available for lead generation. However, consumers’ demands are growing more sophisticated. They want personalized marketing content and to be able to interact with a brand through whichever channel they choose. Using data to refine your marketing efforts improves your ability to maintain engagement with current and potential clients. Data-driven marketing created a number of new opportunities, according to Forbes and Turn’s “Data Driven and Digitally Savvy: The Rise of the New Marketing Organization” report.

It’s hard to create meaningful customer engagement without the personalization capabilities of data. Leaders in data-driven marketing are more likely to report they have a competitive advantage and experience an increase in revenue. Although some companies have been implementing customer data points into their marketing efforts for some time, it’s becoming more important than ever before to maintain relevance and ensure individuals are getting valuable content.

Here’s a tip for all the business owners who manage and write their own content for their website. Write content that is natural, compelling and interesting for your readers. If you wouldn’t be interested in reading the content why would anyone else? Ask yourself, if it wasn’t your own company site, would you read through it without losing interest?

Strong Content Reigns Supreme

More and more you hear industry experts talking about how ‘content is king’ for online rankings. That keywords no longer matter and link building is a thing of the past. While algorithms have changed dramatically over the years, the truth is that keywords and on-page coding and link building are not as important as they once were. That’s not to say that keywords and link building is irrelevant. They still play an important role; however, the largest factor is indeed content.

Social media is an important tool for lead generation and affiliate marketing programs. While these networks can help your brand connect with a wider audience or reach more qualified prospects, it’s important to avoid any significant missteps with these platforms. Here are some crucial errors that you need to prevent:

1. Taking advantage of inappropriate news events
While some real-life events can be used to express a viral brand message like Oreo’s tweet about the power outage at the 2013 Super Bowl, not everything is fair game on social media. Some brands found themselves in hot water this year after putting a promotional spin on inappropriate events, according to Tech Republic. The same goes for getting involved in trending hashtags without researching them first. It’s crucial to think about how something may be interpreted by others before posting to avoid reputational hazards.

While some marketers have been saying email is dead for several years, this tactic is still relevant for many industries. However, it has changed a great deal over time. Techniques that converted customers in the past may not be relevant any longer. Email isn’t going anywhere. It can still be incorporated into other digital marketing strategies.

With any form of marketing, it is important to know how it performed. It’s not good enough anymore to just know that it worked. It serves you better to know how effective your marketing strategies are, and why.

The same can be said for a Pay-Per-Call campaign. As a business, you don’t just want to see if there were calls coming through. You want stats on how many calls came in, how long the calls lasted, the conversion rates, and where the calls originated from. The more data you can gather about your campaign, the better optimized it can be, and the more revenue it can generate.

For example, if a florist company knew their metrics, they could be aiming for the following in their campaign:

These parameters could be set because the florist company already knows that calls under 120 seconds typically do not turn into a lead. The geographical restrictions are because they obviously don’t want to advertise for calls in areas they cannot serve. Finally, this florist company would practically only want incoming calls during times they are open for business. This is just an example of how a business can benefit from Pay-Per-Call, and how they can set measurable goals.

With offline marketing we can easily attribute unique toll free numbers to each publication whether it’s a newspaper, radio station or tv network. Based on the campaign-specific phone number we create for you, we know where the calls originate from, and can gather the relevant details.

While online campaigns may not seem as easy to track, but the right tools can help us understand the path the customer took to reach the point of calling. From the keyword(s) used to reaching the landing page with the unique phone number, it is important that each phase of the customer’s journey is optimized. Every element of the Pay-Per-Call campaign helps encourage your potential customer to ultimately take that last step and call your business.

How can all this data help you increase business? Quite simply, it can help you ‘trim the fat’ on your campaign. For example, maybe you are doing a print campaign and 1 publication generates 100 billable calls, but only 10% turn into customers. Compare this with another publication that generates 50 billable calls each month but converts 40% into customers. The math would suggest that the former is costing you more to acquire a new customer than the latter. Once you identify your true cost per customer across both publications, it might be in your best interest to cut off the more expensive publisher and invest a little more per call with the 2nd publisher. In doing so, your call volume and total conversions can increase, generating more business than before.

To find out more about our Call Tracking and Pay-Per-Call services, contact us at 604-273-0002.